The charlatans’ response to the Tucson tragedy
…A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the
superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame
of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment.
From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering,
society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to
progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there
is a reflex to blame conservatives first….Now we have explainers. They came into vogue with the murder of
President Kennedy. They explained why the “real” culprit was not a
self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to
support Castro. No, the culprit was a “climate of hate” in conservative
Dallas, the “paranoid style” of American (conservative) politics or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism….
On Sunday, the Times explained Tucson: “It is facile and mistaken to
attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea
Party members. But . . .” The “directly” is priceless.
Three days before Tucson, Howard Dean explained
that the Tea Party movement is “the last gasp of the generation that
has trouble with diversity.” Rising to the challenge of lowering his
reputation and the tone of public discourse, Dean smeared Tea Partyers
as racists: They oppose Obama’s agenda, Obama is African American, ergo
. . .
Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals
whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as
racists. This McCarthyism of the left – devoid of intellectual content,
unsupported by data – is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for
avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the
American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its
current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.
